In Our Time - Humboldt

Episode Date: September 28, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander Von Humboldt. He was possibly the greatest and certainly one of the most famous scientists of the 19th century. Darwin described him as 'the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived'. Goethe declared that one learned more from an hour in his company than eight days of studying books and even Napoleon was reputed to be envious of his celebrity.A friend of Goethe and an influence on Coleridge and Shelly, when Darwin went voyaging on the Beagle it was Humboldt's works he took for inspiration and guidance. At the time of his death in 1859, the year Darwin published On the Origin of Species, Humboldt was probably the most famous scientist in Europe. Add to this shipwrecks, homosexuality and Spanish American revolutionary politics and you have the ingredients for one of the more extraordinary lives lived in Europe (and elsewhere) in the 18th and 19th centuries. But what is Humboldt's true position in the history of science? How did he lose the fame and celebrity he once enjoyed and why is he now, perhaps, more important than he has ever been? With Jason Wilson, Professor of Latin American Literature at University College London, Patricia Fara, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, Jim Secord, Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project.

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or wherever you get your pods. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Darwin described him as the greatest scientific traveller who's ever lived. Gerta declared that one learned more from an hour in his company

than eight days of studying books. And even Napoleon was envious of his celebrity. He's the Prussian scientist and explorer Alexander. Kanda von Humboldt. At the time of his death in 1859, the year Darwin published on the origin of species, Humboldt was the most famous scientist in Europe. Add to this, shipwrecks, daring tropical adventures, Spanish-American revolutionary politics, and his determination to prove that one man himself could contain the knowledge of the cosmos, and you have the ingredients from one of the more extraordinary lives lived in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. But what's

Humboldt's true position in the history of science? How did he lose the fame in celebrity he once enjoyed and why is he now perhaps more important than he's ever been. With me to discuss Alexander von Humboldt, our Patricia Farah, fellow of Clare College at Cambridge University, Jason Wilson, Professor of Latin American Literature at University College London, and Jim Seacord, Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. James Wilson, we're talking about a man massively great and massively important in his time, who many people will have only the vagus knowledge of. Can you? He was plated by royalty, mentioned by Byron and

Don Juan, read avidly by laymen and experts alike. Can you give us a sense of why he was so celebrated at the end of the 18th and in the first half of the 19th century? Yes, well, as you've said, he was a household name. How, and he became so famous, this is very interesting because you have to bear in mind that he also lost that fame. So he was someone who was incredibly famous, and then by the end of the 19th century, he was almost forgotten. Which makes one think that it was he himself who was important. And one of the interesting things with Humboldt is, how he related to other scientists and how he collaborated with people and how he was at the centre of intellectual life in Paris, which, as Walter Benjamin said, you know, was the capital of the 19th century. So Humboldt's fame is related to his personality,

as much as to his scientific works and his travels and so on. So it's also related to his writings. So he spent, as we're going to talk about later, a long time, nearly five and a bit years in South America, and then spent 30 years writing up his researches. He was translated three times into English in the 19th century, and then nothing. So one even has to question whether Humboldt's fame

was based on his works, as much as I said before as on his personality. When you were mentioned in Paris, he wrote in French, as I understand. He wrote in French, and a bit in German. He was a polyglot. He spoke four or five languages. languages perfectly. He was self-taught in virtually every branch of science available to him at the time. He was genuinely a reneissance man. In fact, someone in the Times Literary Supplement

quipped, he was the last man who knew everything. He was also a very fine artist and drawer and his plants and his maps and so on are wonderful to look at. Absolutely. And wonderfully accurate. Absolutely. They're beautiful. Not only the maps, but maybe the key word that sums up his fame at the time is the mountain Chimboraso. And his drawing of Chimboraso both as a visual representing the actual mountain in the Andes and his section of the mountain in terms of the plant geography are extraordinary achievements. You know, he'd be famous just for those alone, let alone his writing. Can you give us a little idea of his background?

I mentioned in the introduction him being aristocrat. He financed these great expeditions himself and his financial security. financial security, let's live with that, enabled him to go as an apprentice to one great scholar after another, to learn from them. Can you tell us anything else about the background that might be useful? Well, he came from the Prussian nobility. He was the second son.

His elder brother, Wilhelm was equally famous as an education list and a linguist. I suppose he was lucky, I say this, not ironically, that both his parents died fairly young and he inherited a massive amount of money. It allowed him to be free and do what he wanted. Right from the beginning, Humboldt wanted to travel abroad. He hated home, he disliked his mother, supposedly he didn't shed a tear when she died.

And he's in a private document which was called My Confessions, along Russo lines, which he wrote on the top, Don't Publish. He actually said that his home life, he'd been outraged, he'd been abused at home. Now, what that means is there was no love. So he wanted to go abroad And he from the beginning Wanted to go to the tropics One of his tutors

Was the translator of Robinson Crusoe Camp And Camp also wrote a book about Latin America A early friend That he travelled around Britain with He even went up to Derbyshire Was called George Forster Who travelled on Cook's second tour

Around the world And Humboldt had picked up this notion To become a scientist You had to travel You had to know the world. So we had somebody that, Patricia Farad, do you want to add anything to that? Before I move on to other aspects of his character, I mean, this, we've described a man who literally tried to learn everything.

That must have started very young. Did he have early tutors? Can you give us a little bit more there? I just want to build up a sense so the listeners know we're dealing with somebody who really bestrored disciplines and was envied by Napoleon and so on and so forth. I don't think we've quite got there. Well, I think it's interesting that as a student to you is at the Mining Academy. And mining might not sound as though it's got much to do with science. But in Germany, in particular, a lot of new theories of geology were being put forward by mining experts,

such as Abraham Werner, who was at the Freiburg Academy of Mines. And so mining wasn't just about digging coal out of the ground. There were a lot of intellectual work involved in analyzing the ground and the chemical processes that go on. So although he was self-taught at the mining academy, he would have learned a lot of maths and a lot of what we would now call Earth sciences. In geology, of course. And in what is now called geology, which didn't really, I mean, it's a bit difficult using disciplinary names like geology and earth sciences, because of course they didn't exist at the time. And even sciences, which seemed quite old to us, like biology, were only just being created in the early 19th century. So Humboldt was one of the people who helped to create a lot of the science.

that we have around today. And I think because he was such a flamboyant explorer, he also helped to persuade people that science could be done in a different kind of way, that instead of staying in your study and looking at your books and going into a laboratory, which was the traditional way that science had been done in the past, people like Humboldt went out and travelled around the world. And in a sense, he used the whole world as his laboratory

and brought it back to Europe. What did the ideas of the Enlightenment? He was born in 17, 16. And what did the ideas of the Enlightenment bring to him, or what did he take from them? He certainly worked in a very quantitative way. That's one of the main characteristics of Enlightenment thought. He believed passionately in taking lots and lots and lots and lots of meticulous measurements.

And whenever he traveled, he took whole trunks full of apparatus with him. And the way he approached the world was to derive mathematical laws through detailed quantitative measurement. And that's a very enlightenment way of looking at the world, I think. So we have an obsessive scholar, curious about extending his own knowledge and world knowledge from a very early age

and with the money and the energy and the support to do so. He was passionate to travel. It was quite difficult for him to organise his first expedition. He'd originally wanted to go to Egypt and then he'd want to travel with Napoleon and in the end he went to the Spanish government

and got permission to travel in South America. How far we've, I mentioned again in the introduction about his interest in revolutionary politics, particularly with Simon Bolivar, but it started earlier. He was in Paris at the time of the revolution and said he'd carried sand to the, he'd helped to build new temples in Paris in 1790 when he was what, 21? I mean, was he, and this seemed to be sustained throughout his life, that he was on the side of revolutionaries and literally jumped from a podium when he was sitting beside the king when a revolutionary group walked by

in order to join them. I think, like a lot of historical characters, what he actually did can be interpreted in many different ways, but you can think of him as an ardent revolutionary. He was certainly very, very opposed to slavery. He was in favour of the American and the French revolutions, and when he was in South American when he travelled elsewhere, he was very much interested in the revolutionary movements,

and he was a close friend of Simon Bolivar. But another way of thinking about it was that he also was interested in developing, Europe's interests. And for instance, he set up, he enabled guano to be exported as a fertilizer to Europe. And that you could see that as a way in which South America was being exploited by Europe. So I think there's always two or several different ways of viewing his revolutionary activities. Yes, but the fact is I think that that's almost undermining, as you obviously know, five thousand times more than I do. But that's slightly undermining what I see as a proper and lifelong.

interest in and support for revolutionary persons. He was almost suggested to Simon Bolivar and go back to South America and change things. He got a lot of, you've told us what he drew from the Enlightenment. He drew quite a bit from the French revolutionary ideas too, didn't he? He was certainly, well, he was sent out there by, under the auspices of the Spanish government. And their regime in South America was actually far more enlightened than we might think it might think it was and he was certainly very much in favour

of encouraging local interests he was also very interested in how South America as a continent itself reflected revolutionary activity. I'm just trying to draw quickly what he got from revolutionary ideas in France I mean ideas did he take the absence of God

obviously as I understand he didn't mention God in the whole of his works he never mentioned God and the emphasis on reason absolutely yes and these he drew from very strongly Jim Cicot, I understand it, that balance was a very important idea for him, and that tracks back to the great chemist Lavoisier, sometimes called the father of chemistry ignoring our own priestly,

but never mind that at the moment. So why was balance so important? What did he mean by balance? Well, one way, this ties into what Patricia was just saying about revolution. In many ways, the way to think about somebody like Humboldt in relationship to revolution isn't so much that he goes out and becomes this active political revolutionary. Rather, he sees a way in which an understanding of nature can provide a new view of humanity

that ultimately will achieve the kind of aims that political revolution can actually achieve. So he's very keen within that to get the idea that humanity needs to view things coolly and calmly and to understand the relationship of forces that make up nature. Nature is not something that's, you know, huge forces in conflict with one another in a kind of great sublime basis that in the end leaves, people just overwhelmed and their emotions taking them over. Instead, if you withdraw yourself from the situation and you look at it very carefully and you think about nature in terms of a balance of forces, all integrated, you can ultimately understand yourself much better that way too.

So it works out very well, I think. I mean, if you think about Humboldt, some of his earliest work was not actually in terms of studying the outside environment. It was actually a study of himself. And he was very interested in the relationship between electricity and physiology. He actually did experiments where he opened wounds on himself and put electrodes into them to see the kinds of reactions that he would have. And what he was trying to get at that was the way that his own muscle tissues could be part of a series of chemical forces that then could all be understood. And this ultimately relates to the kind of experience that he'd had both in the mining schools, which had this kind of emphasis on the relationship between the human and the world outside.

It was a much broader kind of education than you might think. and also to French chemistry. French chemistry was a great revolutionary science of the period. It wasn't something, of course, that was directly involved in the revolution proper. I mean, LaVoisier famously was actually executed by the revolution. But Lavoisier's chemistry was actually a symbol of the kind of science that Humboldt wanted to do. And the symbol of that science was the balance, the chemical balance. You could understand all these individual micro forces of nature in relationship to one another

through very careful weighing and measuring of these tiny little things. Talking about measuring, Patricia referred to the he took several donkey loads of scientific instruments along with him. I think he was a four donkey man, wasn't he really. But can you give us some idea of what these instruments were? Well, a typical kind of Humboldt instrument was the eudaometer, which was something that you could actually use

to measure the qualities of the air and the kinds of ways the different airs were being transferred into one another through, say, water vapor entering into it and not entering. You could actually understand the proportions and qualities of air. Similarly, the cyanometer, which is an instrument for an instrument for measuring the blueness of the sky, again, showing the kind of qualities that that particular phenomena had. He always carried many barometers with him because knowing the height that you were at was very important for understanding physical phenomena. He's a large part of his, at that time, and now coming back, substantial reputation,

was based on these measurements, the number of them, the accuracy of them, the amplitude of them. How did he get such accurate instruments? Well, French instrument making, especially during this period, was at a very advanced level. I mean, it was known throughout the world, and there had been great developments within instrument making. So there was a whole, there was a series of technical workshops that someone like Humboldt could draw his instruments from. And he used those kinds of resources. It was extremely important to him because it was exactly in the details of those measurements that things really counted. And he didn't just kind of gather them willy-nilly like a collector.

In fact, he was rather dismissive of just pure collectors. What he wanted to do was to combine these kind of measurements together in to show the underlying laws of nature. That was what was really crucial for him. So can we just sort of try to bring the portrait in this stage of the discussion to an end here, Back to you, Jess and Wilson. Interconnectedness seems to have been the central notion. What sort of connections broadly, briefly, was he trying to make? I think the main connection was between organic and inorganic life and himself, that is, as a human being. So it was an attempt, and I think travel helped him become a universalist.

He saw the whole earth as one entity. And he was a materialist in the sense that the basis of this, was the actual earth, direct experience through the senses of the world, but measured constantly in all sorts of different ways. So in that sense, I seem as a new kind of hero. I mean, part of bringing all these instruments on these sometimes 14 mules was preserving them from breaking. And it was not just instruments that he carried constantly with him,

but books, he brought a library with him. And, of course, all the collections, the dried plants, the skins, the birdskins, these were constantly brought with him. And as a sort of secret journey behind the actual journey, this is part of his reputation. How can somebody, just two people, within retinue, obviously, travel around for nearly five years, three months, without losing the instruments.

And there is even the possibility that he didn't continue his journey onto the Philippines and around the world because his instruments stopped working so well as Jim's been saying. I think another way of tying together the interconnectedness and the revolutionary aspect of his thought is to see how he changed the world from being analyzed historically to being analyzed geographically. Because previously you could think of a division

between the old world and the new world. It's a sort of vertical line down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And in a way, Humbolt was a new Columbus who went over to the new world and he went down into South America. And for him, the division of the world wasn't that historical accident. It was a division around the equator. So he wanted to link the whole northern hemisphere. and the whole southern hemisphere,

which effectively divided the world in a different way. He's a man of many connections, isn't it? Because one thing we haven't even touched on yet, which was very much part of him, it's at the same time he's coming out of the scientific enlightenment. At the same time, he's typifying an emerging individualism, or he'd be emerging for a while. But he's also a romantic with a capital R.

I mean, a friend of persons like Goethe, a friend of Goethe, influence on Coleridge. How did the romantic idea of life fit into his work as a generally known as a scientist? Well, one way of thinking about it is the experiments that Jim mentioned. That's very much part of the sort of romantic natuille philosoph and view of science that you as an individual are into... Nature philosophy. Yes, nature philosophy, which is very prevalent in Germany.

In the early 19th century, an affected German science and made it rather different in character from British science, although it did influence people like Coleridge and Faraday. So part of it is thinking of you as an individual being integrated within nature, and that is a very romantic view of the world. And also when you read his travel voyages, his accounts of his voyages, he writes them in a sort of a very romantic, exciting, glamorous language. Which completely seduced Darwin, present.

It's not dry, arid, scientific text at all. and you get very much the feeling of an individual who's making his personal voyage of exploration and who's communicating with the countryside about him and also the people he encounters. We get to know a lot about them as well. And I think that's another aspect of his revolutionary sort of interests that we do hear about the local guides as well.

We can take the question of mountains, Jim, as he called, because Schiller, the German poet Schiller, criticized von Humboldt for the way he talks. talked about mountains. And Humboldt defending himself very strongly. Can you tell us of the criticism and what the division was, because it's a fascinating one now? Well, basically, it comes down to what you were supposed to do in a mountain, I think. If you're humbled, what you do is you go up the mountain, you know, feel what's there. But the way that you feel it is through this very detailed scientific work of understanding the balance of forces and the way in which all these

forces collaborate. You understand it in a way by, by losing yourself into your instruments. And ultimately, in fact, he was trying to produce not just a kind of heroic narrative of his voyage. As this main purpose was to actually, if you went up a mountain, was to get a series of scientific results that would help you to better understand the world from that elevated perspective that the mountain actually provided. But the aesthetic was very important too, wasn't it? So the aesthetic came out of the scientific. Yeah, the aesthetic comes out of the science in this way.

And in effect, what happens is that you gain a sense of. sublimity through your understanding of the laws of nature. Ultimately what happens is the individual, in fact, disappears if you do the perfect mountain climb and the perfect kind of scientific work, because you disappear effectively into your instruments into the understanding of the laws of nature. But at the same time, of course, there's a kind of heroic apotheosis of the person who's actually accomplished that, in other words, Humboldt. And it's very interesting. Humboldt did not actually, when his famous mountain climb, you know, when he climbed what effectively, was thought to be the highest mountain in the world,

he actually didn't reach the top. And part of the reason he doesn't reach the top is that he goes as far as he can at a point where he can maintain his rational faculties. And Schiller, I think, would have continued to go on. In fact, I think Simon Bolivar... He did. Bolivar got to the top.

But when he goes to the top, he actually has... He's kind of almost insensible by the time he's there. And for him, this is kind of a great moment. for humble that wouldn't have been the right thing to do. In fact, you wanted to keep the rational faculties because that's the way in which you aesthetically understood what nature was. Can you tell us then, you haven't been,

you've been sort of skirting around this great voyage to South America, which, as I think as Jason said, spent just over five years there and 30 years working on what he discovered, pregnant out 30 volumes and so on and so forth. he wanted to go to Africa well with Napoleon he didn't get on that he missed that so he went there sort of by accident

but let's forget all that he goes there with a good friend of his and he stays there that long what kind of place was it in the European imagination he went there 1799 for five years if they thought about it at all what did they think about it well I'm thinking of a hogarth print

of a poor poet with someone coming to get some bills off him and there's a map on the wall of a Peruvian gold mine And I think that for Europe, Latin America, Spanish America, was essentially wealth. It was booty that was brought over by the Spaniards. Yeah, and the Spaniards, to preserve that, created all sorts of monopolies. It was closed, it was a closed colonial society to other Europeans.

The previous non-Spanied scientists who'd been out there was in 1735, de la Condamine. So he was the first person to go there for some 60 years. After his journey. His first man, Spaniard. Yeah, because the Spaniards went, they really didn't have any scientists, they were interested in blocking other people coming to their continent and exploiting its own wealth for themselves. After Humboldt, you had the independence revolutions, and so the countries were closed off for further reasons. So over a period of about 60 years, his report back from this country of fabulous wealth was unique. Also, it was uncharted, it was dangerous.

We are also talking of a man who, you know, went in perilous places and survived. He's very aware that he is literally a second Columbus, that he's going into Terra Incognita. The coast of Latin America was well charted, but the interior was not even really known to the Spaniards. I mean, he several times says, well, the Spaniards themselves don't travel. I am the first person to move around.

And he didn't know the whole of South America. He didn't go down to the south. He didn't go to what is now known as Argentina or Chile. It was just in the tropical bits. But it was pretty unique. And he was a private individual. and he wasn't working for a government. And he made these fantastic maps.

Prussia, I mean, so he's going along there and he's charting. So there's many levels with this man we're trying to bring out because on one level he's charting stuff. He's bringing maps, plants, specimens and that sort of thing. I think he was very influential in making science much more visual. And I think it's important to remember as well that techniques of printing, engraving, were becoming much more widespread.

It became much cheaper to print. and people had to learn how to look at charts. They had in Martin Rudwicks town, they had to use a new visual language. It now seems extraordinary to us. We're so used to seeing everything summarised in graphs and charts and plans and maps that it's sort of second nature to us. In the early 19th century, that wasn't the case.

There just wasn't the plethora of visual material that's around now. That's partly for technological reasons that there wasn't the possibility of reproducing them cheaply. And it's also because people thought verbally rather than visually. And I think one of Humboldt's most important innovations was to present his data in a very visual way. And that meant that he could condense thousands and thousands of thousands of mathematical observations into a single curved line. And so he presented the globe with these sort of smooth, variable curves going round them.

So you could see it to flash how different parts of the globe were linked in terms of temperate. and pressure and other lateral variables. Still used, yes. It's very important at this point because when we think of all these measurements and we think of the way in which they're seen as part of a balance and so forth, the way that Humboldt really liked to express that was through maps that showed measurements connected together through lines, in other words, through iso maps. And so when we look at something like a modern weather map,

we're looking at the kind of map that Humboldt invented. This was a new invention. If you look at old maps from the 18th century, topographic maps even, they tend to show a little bump like pimples for mountains. If you look at a 19th century map, they show the kind of contour lines that we're familiar with. That's the sort of mapping that Humboldt really put forward and really expressed. And for him, that kind of ISO thinking was really central to the way that an individual could understand the whole earth and the way that it worked. One thing that's really fascinating about this, about talking about him,

is that you keep as it would jump one keeps, I did, from one thing to another. But you have to get the whole man because in South America, he, with South, he is a social thing. associated with South American revolutionary politics and his friendship with Simon Bolivar, whom he met in Paris, but he more or less encouraged to go back and start a revolution in South America. Now, can you give us a better than I have done fix on that? Well, Jason may have more to say. My impression is actually that his attitude toward actual revolution

that was rather more ambiguous. Humble provides in many ways the foundations in nature for thinking that South America is really important that there's a South American nature that really deserves a kind of place in the international sun. And that remains very important within South American political life, in many ways even now.

But in terms of actual support for political revolution, I think it's not so clear. Yes, I mean, I think the thing to bear in mind that he was there with a passport from the king, he had to be very careful during his trip to make any criticisms at all of colonial society. It was when he got back to Paris, that he started meeting, not only Bolivia, but many other Latin American plotters.

And he was always, he was a contradictory man. I mean, when he ran out of money and he used up his massive fortune on the publication of his journey, he had to get a job. And his job was with the Chamberlain with the Prussian king. So he was a contradictory man that he remained with the clothes of the directorate, you know, with his jackets and his blue trousers. The revolution. Yes, he remained dressed as revolutionary.

but he worked for the king. And that contradiction is also relatable to his revolutionary status. He wasn't a revolutionary in the sense of wanting a revolution, but he encouraged democracy. He was a great believer in freedom. He was a Russoist rather than a revolutionary. I mean, in 1848, when there were the revolutions in Berlin,

he did lead a parade of revolutionaries through the street, but at the same time, his own politics were quite conservative, and he was a close friend of the king. So there's always this ambivalence. Can we talk, just backtrack a little. How much was he influenced by English explorers against self-financing, like Joseph Banks and President of Aurora Society, and then James Cook, not self-financing?

How, because they preceded him. Did he take any inspiration from them? Is he part of a, is he, again, contextualizing again, is he part of some tradition there, an exploring tradition, an intellectual exploring tradition? I think it's more that rather than seeing any direct influence, it's more that Joseph Banks and Humboldt were both forerunners in this sort of general move towards making scientists able to travel in the outer world,

of taking science out of the laboratory, out of the study, out of the library, and making the whole world your laboratory. And I think Banks and Humboldt are quite interesting comparisons because Banks was like Humboldt self-financing. And then he came back and became a very serious. important scientific administrator. Humboldt didn't do that, but on the other hand, his brother set up the Humboldt Universitat in Berlin. So similarly, Humboldt was himself quite closely allied with German university organisation. So I think they have quite sort of parallel sort of lives.

And if you think about Frankenstein, which first came out in 1817, the outer sort of layer of Frankenstein has got an explorer who goes off to the North Pole to search for the secret of magnetism. So you can see romantic characters like Banks and Humboldt as being sort of role models for that in a way. I just had something about that. Humboldt was very friendly with George Forster who travelled on Cook's second journey. Even the way Humboldt wrote, even the way Humboldt wrote, even the titles of his books imitate Forster. So he was a great role model. He was some 10 years older.

Also revolutionary, he actually stood for Mayans. He was actually, and died as a French revolutionary Jacobin. So that was very important also for Humboldt's formation. You've mentioned it's very difficult to particularise here, but let's try to do it now. The climbing of this mountain, Chimborrotsa? Chimboraso. Thank you.

Now, and the map he drew of that and why that was important. Then thought to be the highest mountain in the world. And so when you've said he didn't quite get the top, Let's develop that a little bit to tell people what was really important about that. Why this and what he described of this and drew of this, you'll keep returning to. Yes. I think this is part of a romantic notion of, after all, mountains became important. We know this in the 19th century, the climbing of the mountain, the view from the top.

And the view is often a vision. I don't want to correct my colleagues, but Simon Belhova actually didn't climb Chimboras. He wrote about climbing it. To climb it in his mind was sufficient. It wasn't actually climbed until 1880. I feel like him. I feel like him. Sometimes in the leg of.

The first person to get to the top of Chimborasa was 70 years later. Well, that's... There's a lot of books that need correcting in that case. Absolutely. No, that's very nice. So, Simon Belivor, needed to think that he had attained what Humboldt had almost done in order to give himself some sort of,

sort of inner power. Yeah, but let's talk about, because we're moving into the last third of this program, and just want some detail about this mountain. Chimborazo, okay, we know at that time people thought it was the highest mountain in the world. It was a mountain you could see from the sea.

So it was a mountain that many people had seen very steep, it's volcanic, it's conical, it's very beautiful. So the climbing of it was not just an attempt to take all the measurement, to see what happens to oxygen, to see, etc., etc.

But it was also a symbolic attainment, an attainment of getting to the very top. One can almost think you're getting almost close to God without that word ever being mentioned. There was something about arriving at the top of this that gave people this view, and I call it a vision. Jim, can you tell us what he did with this mountain when he drew it? Well, this illustration, for one thing, is huge.

It's as large as a big kitchen table. And you fold it out, and there's a beautiful picture of the mountain, but the most interesting things about it in many ways are the words on it. Because on it, you can see, you know, all sorts of plants, animals, the names of them all shown as you're going up.

And what he's interested in, in fact, is as you go up the mountain, as you have that aesthetic experience, you also are going to see and know these various plants and animals. And of course, those change as the altitude changes. And all those measurements he had done then goes to show,

and the collections he had made, goes to show how those things are related. On the sides of the map, there's further information about what you see at the different heights as you go up the mountain. So in the end, all the information about that particular climb, it isn't just the actual

experience of the climb that matters. It's the way that all those different phenomena that are recorded in the words on the visual document are all present. And you sit and look at that whole thing and you have the humboldity and experience of being on that

high mountain peak and looking over the whole thing. And that's the aesthetic experience that he's trying to recreate. It's that combination which ensnared a young Charles Darwin who read Humboldt and was very moved and, well, I've used the word inspired, inspired to go forth and do likewise, isn't it? I mean, how much is the, on origin of species, owe to Humboldt in its writing? Well, I think it owes a great deal in many ways. I mean, for one thing, just the fact that Darwin went on the Beagle voyages in many ways

an outcome of the fact that he had read Humboldt. Darwin had been really enamored of the whole Humboldian kind of personal narrative, and he wanted to have an experience like that. So even before he was offered the chance of going in the Beagle voyage, Darwin was going to go on a voyage like that himself and do that same sort of thing. Within the origin of species, a lot of these kinds of aesthetic experiences come across as well. They're very famously expressed in the famous passage about the tangled bank, where Darwin compares nature to a tangled bank that you can see in all the interconnectedness that's present there. And I think that interconnectedness of nature and the different ways that one organism relates to another organisms, that organisms

have particular niches, that you find certain types of animals at certain types of places and not others, which is so fundamental to understanding the kind of view of nature that's in the origin of species, that's really very hard to imagine. without Humboldt being present in Darwin's imagination. Do you like to develop that, Jason? Yes, I think that maybe the big difference at that moment in time was that Humboldt remained, his theories remained harmonious, that nature was this very delicate balance that included his own subjectivity.

With Darwin, you've got an under the tangled bank metaphor, you've got a sense of war, and a war that was so ferocious that individuals, people like Darwin himself, were horrified at this cause. constant killing and death. This is not in Humboldt. And it's interesting that difference, and it could explain why Humboldt was, as it were, nudged off the centre playing field of science at the second half of the 19th century. That his work didn't lead to this notion of this terrible war going on behind the surface of things.

And it does seem to be curious, isn't it, Humboldt dies in 1859 just after, just before Darwin's comes out. But Darwin's book does seem to, as Jason says, dislodge him, Patricia Farrow. I think one of the things that's interesting is to think about how his reputation differs in Germany from his reputation in England and France, because his accounts

of the journeys were mostly written in French and then translated into English. And so in England, he is this sort of romantic heroic explorer who sort of climbs up mountains and dashes across ravines and things. In Germany, those books were rather looked down upon as being sort of

venture stories suitable for children. And they were more interested in the only major book he published in German, Cosmos, which is a sort of multi-volume, some more mathematical account of the whole world. And so, in a sense, he had these two different reputations in England and in Germany, which got, and that sort of difference between them got perpetuated right through into the 20th century. particularly in England and America since the 70s and 80s, people thinking about this early 19th century period have called it the period of Humboldian science,

this idea that you go out and you look at the world and you measure it and you condense the world into simple connected laws of balancing forces. Whereas in Germany, that image never ever existed. And until reunification of Germany in the 90s, Humboldt had a very different image in Western Germany from the one that he did in Eastern Germany. Yeah, in Western Germany who was a liberal...

Well, Western Germany they were trying to sort of recouped. Eastly was a revolutionary. Yeah, because during the war he was sort of naturally, he was sort of held up as a great Aryan. And then after the war in Western Germany, they found lots of evidence that in fact he was very pro-Jewish. And they set him up as a sort of German, international, diplomatic scientists, whereas in eastern Germany

they were very interested in presenting him as a revolutionary, so he's a sort of proto-Marxist. Can I just return for one moment, Jim Seacott, to this idea that maybe, it's obviously too simplistic, but there's something in it, that Darwin's work eclipse and even destroyed Humboldt's reputation, which

Jason referred to. Can we just develop that a little bit? Because his eclipse was severe in the scientific world, doesn't it? Yes. I mean, I would see it not so much because of the issue of struggle. I think that's quite an interesting point about the difference between Humboldt and Darwin. I think as much as anything, there's two things going on.

One is almost all scientific work eventually does get kind of, in some sense, plowed in and tends to disappear. So it's very rare for a scientist to maintain the kind of high reputation that they have up to the point that they die further on than that. And in effect, Darwin is quite unusual in that way and the way his reputation has been continually refructified over the last hundred years or so. So Humboldt's process in some senses is more ordinary.

I think that there is a kind of way in which, in the very late 19th century, there is quite a lot of interest in Humboldt, but gradually I think especially I think as nationalistic tensions rise in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then I think some of the internationalism that Humboldt represented comes to seem a bit old-fashioned or not quite the sort of, not quite representing this sort of way forward for a lot of people.

And of course, in this country, especially, after the First World War, I think that, you know, anything that's identified so specifically as being Prussian isn't going to, you know, maintain that kind of reputation. So I think that there's some of those things happening with that. Jason, Jason Wilson, is there also the point that having opened up these signs

as others took them up and ran with them and went further and split them and the attempt to hold the cosmos within himself proved to be that was that, it could never be attempted again, and you could get further if you did less. I think so. I think that implicit in his position is failure. And the interesting thing about Cosnos is that he didn't finish it.

So he couldn't write the book that was going to be his summum. He couldn't put it all together. Even his Latin American works, if you see the whole lot together, 30 folio-Corto volumes, nobody's going to read it. Nobody's going to look at the whole thing. It doesn't come together. I'm very disappointed. No.

So we've got this problem of how could he put his massive learning into a form. Even as a person, he was an obsessive talker. His sentences are over-packed with information. He's a curious person. There was a desperation to hold it altogether that didn't quite work. But there is a sense that he is finding a new place at the moment, Patricia, in thinking that his work is finding a new place in intellectual. thought at the moment? Absolutely. Now, he's a colossal hero in Germany and I think because everybody now has a

great investment in preserving our environment, I think Humboldt's becoming a new sort of hero. He's being converted into someone who can be represented as an early ecologist, which he wasn't, but he's very, it's very useful to set up someone as the founding father of ecology. And so he's a useful symbol, both the two halves of Germany now united together and also Humboldt is already a famous figure in Anglo-American scholarship. So he's an absolutely appropriate emblem to unify the world

and to campaign for preserving it for the future as well. Do you think that his influence will now grow again? I actually think it will. In fact, I hope it will because I think Humboldt represents certain aspects of science which often are forgotten about it. And for one thing, one of the reasons you could say that Humboldt isn't potentially as remembered as well as someone like Darwin,

is that there's no individual discovery that you could say Humboldt discovered that. And we know, you know, like oxygen or something like that, or natural selection. Humboldt in some ways is more important because he invented a whole series of practices and ways of doing science, things like the isomaps, things like the kind of ways of measuring that he had. And those kinds of things have a long history in science. Well, thank you all very much for that.

Thank you for Patricia Farah, Jason Wilson, and Jim Seekaw. we'll be discussing the 12th century Islamic philosopher of Eeroas. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.